Some futures are scarier than others. The future of print magazine journalism? Scary. The future of American politics? Scary. The future of this fragile global ecosystem upon which our lives and those of every being who is and ever will be alive depend? Scary. Oh heck.

But the future is also wonderful. The future is full of color changing tattoos. The future is full of friendly heart-fixing nanobots. In the future, regenerated mammoths roam the tundra, science fiction is queer, and Instagram is mostly poetry.

This week, we’re thinking a lot about what the future might hold, and where FM fits into that shiny chrome-colored vision. It’s hard to imagine what our plucky handmade little mag will look like in The Age of the Robots. Then again, could the first FM editors writing the first editors’ note twenty-five years ago possibly have imagined this weird, terrifying, beautiful 2017 cyber-reality?

No matter what comes next, we’ve resolved to celebrate what has come before. After all, this is more than just The Future Issue™. It’s also our birthday. Forty years ago in 1977, two intrepid reporters decided to milk the cash cow that was print media and start a pop culture rag called, incredibly, “What Is To Be Done?” Twenty-five years ago, in 1992, a cabal of far less intrepid newspaper administrators decided to crack down on fun, murdering The What and replacing it with Fifteen Minutes Magazine, a similar but less Communist weekly supplement. Small, angry, and overwhelmingly analog, FM was born.

So let’s blow out the candles, crack open another issue, and wait for the robots to come.